August-September 2023 • Nebraskaland 31
Q: What do you eat at meal times?
A: All of our meals include fry bread of some kind, and
usually also wojapi, a berry mix that you dip the fry bread in.
A lot of our foods are soup-based, including corn soup. And of
course, we always have buff alo meat.
Q: What are the diff erent types of dances?
A: There's the men's northern traditional. We still do that
up here because many of our members are mixed, especially
with the Lakota and Dakota. There's the men's fancy dance,
which we don't really have any members who dance that
up here, but our southern relatives [in Oklahoma] host the
Fancy Dance World Championships — you have to be really
energetic and move a lot. They drop and do the splits in the
end, and it's really entertaining.
And then we have the men's straight dancers, who are
generally adorned with otter skin caps and an otter that goes
down their backs. And we also have the grass dancers who
are moving really fast, keeping up with that movement and
imitating the grass blowing in the breeze.
Generally, women's traditional and women's fancy dancers
are moving pretty quick, too. And there's the women's jingle
dress dance, as well.
Q: How are dancers judged?
A: We do team dances, and it's judged by individuals who are
selected — generally they're elders or people who really know
the powwow scene, who have traveled to diff erent powwows
and have seen a lot of these dances at other places. They look
for cadence and rhythm — do dancers stop right at the end of
Women's jingle dress dancers wear gowns that
feature metal cones.
